Christine Delphy

Christine Delphy
Christine Delphy at LSE, February 2016
Born	1941
Nationality	French
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Known for	Co-founder of the review Nouvelles Questions Féministes (New Feminist Issues) with Simone de Beauvoir

Christine Delphy (born 1941) is a French sociologist, feminist, writer and theorist. She was a co-founder of Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (Women's Liberation Movement) in 1970 and of the journal Nouvelles questions féministes (New Feminist Issues) with Simone de Beauvoir in 1981.

Christine Delphy was born in 1941 to her parents who owned a local pharmacy. In the documentary film on her life and ideas, "Je ne suis pas féministe, mais..." Delphy describes an early feminist consciousness in observing her parents: though running the pharmacy was labor-intensive for both of them, when they came home at lunch, Delphy noticed her father putting his feet up to rest and read the newspaper while her mother was obliged to cook a midday meal and then do the dishes before they both returned to work.

Nevertheless, Delphy did not always identify as a feminist, owing to stigma around the term. In a television interview in 1985, she described a period of her life when she routinely prefaced comments with, "Je ne suis pas féministe, mais..." (the phrase from which the film draws its title).

Delphy studied sociology at the University of Chicago, the University of Paris and the University of California, Berkeley. Returning to France, Delphy was interested in pursuing a dissertation project on women, but she describes in Je ne suis pas féministe, mais... meeting resistance to the topic in her then-advisor Pierre Bourdieu, who told Delphy that there was no one to advise such a project because no one researches women (though French sociologists like Andrée Michel had already published significant research). Delphy agreed to pursue rural sociology instead, but the question of women, and particularly the economic role women played, emerged in this project as well. While pursuing fieldwork, "I realized there was a whole set of goods that absolutely did not pass through the marketplace," with much of women's economic contributions functioning as unpaid labor, in contrast to the wage labor that was central to theories of capitalist oppression (that is, the capitalist class extracts the value between the wages they pay workers and the actual value of what the workers produce). "To a degree, the outline of [Delphy's magnum opus] The Main Enemy was already there. The bringing to light not just the economic exploitation of women, but a specific form of economic exploitation."